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UN breathes life into‘responsibility to protect’

By Ramesh Thakur

Mon., March 21, 2011

On March 17, Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized the use of “all necessary measures” short of an invasion and occupation of Libya “to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas” — the first UN-sanctioned combat operations since the 1991 Gulf War.

Resolution 1973 was passed by a 10-0 vote within 24 hours of being introduced, contrary to prevailing expectations that the moment for action had passed and the world once again had watched haplessly from the sidelines. An international military coalition has destroyed Libya’s air defence system, targeted tanks, established a naval blockade and is patrolling Libya’s skies to enforce the no-fly and no-drive zones.

Doctors in besieged Benghazi called for a no-fly zone earlier this month. (ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP)

The game-changer was the juxtaposition of R2P as a powerful new galvanizing norm; the mass defection of Libyan diplomats who joined the chorus of calls for prompt and effective action to protect Libyan civilians, oust Moammar Gadhafi and promote democratic reforms; and the request for a no-fly zone by the Arab League on March 12.

The key decision in Washington was made by President Barack Obama at a contentious meeting of top officials in the White House on March 15. The balance shifted in favour of military action when Hillary Clinton phoned in, influenced by what she was seeing and hearing in the region.

There are many risks and dangers. The military operations could prove inconclusive, inflaming the region still further. Obama’s pivot from non-intervention suggests that U.S. policy is reactive, not strategic. There are inconsistencies in the muted response to protests and uprisings in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, where vital U.S. geopolitical and oil interests are directly engaged.

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While these are “unknown unknowns,” in Donald Rumsfeld’s memorable phrase, the risks of no action were “known knowns.” Gadhafi would have prevailed and embarked on a methodical killing spree of rebel leaders, cities and regions. The recapture of Benghazi would have marked the end of the rebellion against Gadhafi’s rule. Instead, the UN-mandated intervention may mark the beginning of the end for him.

Resolution 1973 marks the first military implementation of the doctrine of “responsibility to protect” (R2P). Had the international community shirked this responsibility, Libya could have become R2P’s graveyard.

In the old world order, international politics, like all politics, was a struggle for power. The new international politics will be about the struggle for the ascendancy of competing normative architectures based on a combination of power, values and ideas.

The UN exists to bring about a world where fear is changed to hope, want gives way to dignity, and apprehensions are turned into aspirations. In the words of the late secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN was “not created in order to bring us to heaven, but to save us from hell.” Failures in Africa and the Balkans in the 1990s reflected structural, political and operational deficiencies that accounted for its inability to save people from a life of hell on earth.

For 350 years — from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 until 1998 — sovereignty functioned as institutionalized indifference. R2P responds to the idealized UN as the symbol of an imagined and constructed community of strangers: We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

R2P gave Obama the necessary intellectual and normative tool to act. His decision to reject the traditional, realpolitik definition of U.S. interests in favour of an alternative, values-accommodating definition of the Libyan crisis was closer to his instincts and consistent with the narrative that won him the White House.

The Arab League initiative and strong Franco-British urgings gave him the requisite political cover and international legitimacy. In Iraq in 2003, Washington did all the pushing but doors stayed firmly shut in most capitals. It does little harm to Washington today to be seen as the reluctant follower rather than the ardent suitor for military intervention in Libya.

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Resolution 1973 makes it clear that this military action is about protecting Libya’s civilian population from attacks by its own government and not concerned with occupying or dismembering the country. Any final settlement of the conflict must be political, not military. Thus Libya is not Iraq nor even Afghanistan. The international community is as sensitive as Americans to fears of western occupation of yet another Muslim country.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been impressively firm and consistent on R2P, leading from the front. He noted that “Resolution 1973 affirms, clearly and unequivocally, the international community’s determination to fulfill its responsibility to protect civilians from violence perpetrated upon them by their own government.”

R2P is coming closer to being solidified as an actionable norm.

Ramesh Thakur, a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, was an R2P Commissioner and a principal author of its report. His most recent book is The Responsibility to Protect: Norms, Laws and the Use of Force in International Politics.

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